FOLLOW US

Conference calls usually are a pain. One of the things I hate the most is having to enter a long PIN followed by a pound sign to join a call. It’s nearly impossible when you’re driving or dialing in from your mobile phone to go back and forth from your email or calendar app to the phone dialer to enter them. They’re painful, and we think there’s a better way.

With ÜberConference we have a “no PIN” solution. When you create your ÜberConference account, you enter all the phone numbers you might be dialing in from (home, cell, office, etc.). The only time you’ll ever need to enter a PIN to join one of your conferences is if you dial in from any number other than the ones on your profile. This is great for you, but what about the other callers? Basically, we treat all the other callers the same way. If you invite somebody to a conference call, they’ll need no PIN and will be automatically added so long as they dial in from a number that you have for them in your address book. This is a great reason to sign in with your Google account or to upload your address book once you’ve joined ÜberConference (it makes it easy for us to identify your callers based on their caller ID).

Of course some people love entering PINs…otherwise why would they put up with it? I was invited to a conference call through another provider today, and I kid you not, there was a 9 digit PIN to get into the conference…and it was shared with everybody on the call. Were there really 900 million other calls going on at that time that would force me to use a 9 digit PIN? C’mon!

Since we hate PINs so much, you may be asking why we provide them to our users…good question. First, you will need it if you call in from some unknown number to keep your conference secure. Second, you may not know everyone needed for the call, so PINs can be shared with people not invited directly. Hopefully after that first amazing UberConference though, everybody will sign up for their own account and not ever need a PIN again 🙂

We’re working on some other features to make joining calls even easier. Soon you’ll be able to have UberConference dial out to all the people you want on the call at the time of your call. All they’ll have to do is answer the call and press 1 to join the UberConference. Sweet, right?

If you have any other suggestions or thoughts, feel free to shoot us a note at ideas@uberconference.com and we’ll be sure to think about them.

At ÜberConference, making sure you have the best possible experience on every call is very important to us. Call quality is a main priority for us, and we’re always monitoring and measuring quality metrics and testing out different configurations, partners, and settings. As we get close to exiting our beta period, we have made some significant improvements to our service, and will be migrating users to our newest platform. We have started emailing users about this transition and most will get a new ÜberConference number assigned to them as part of this process. Everything else should be the same. You’ll just use a different number to dial into, and ÜberConference should be even better!

It’s been a busy time at Firespotter since we started the company and raised our Series A financing from Google Ventures in April 2011. First we launched Nosh, the consumer food app that answers the question “What’s good here?” at any restaurant. We then launched NoshList, an iPad app for restaurants that texts diners when their tables are ready (and we’re seating our 2 millionth diner this month…not bad since it launched just 5 months ago). We also built Jotly, the iPhone and Android app that lets you rate anything. Our latest product, ÜberConference is our first product in the voice communications space. We launched ÜberConference at TechCrunch Disrupt in May 2012 and were overjoyed at winningStartup Battlefield.

As we look back on the past 15 months, we’re very happy with all that’s been done. We are also excitedly looking forward to our increased focus on more and more telephony projects.

With that said, we’re even more excited about the recent closing of ourSeries B financing round, led by the great team at Andreessen Horowitz. Blake Krikorian joins Wesley Chan and me on the Board of Firespotter and we’re thrilled to have Blake with us. This round gives us the firepower to hire quickly and go full bore on all the exciting opportunities in the evolving communications space.

As the proliferation of tablets and mobile devices continues to change the nature of communications, we want to be there leading the charge for innovation. People are still sick of being taken advantage of by their communications providers with their hidden fees, difficult interfaces and clunky solutions. We will always strive to be the “good guys” of communications by being fair, innovative, and relentless in our pursuit of creating the best communications products in the world.

If you are looking to join a great team that is disrupting a huge space, we’d love to talk to you. Check out our jobs page on ÜberConference.com.

We are excited about ÜberConference being in the Evernote DevCup competition for the best products that integrate with the Evernote API. DevCup brings together innovative ideas from all over the world and has over a hundred companies vying for more than $100,000 in prizes.

The ÜberConference Evernote integration was one of the first new features we wanted to add after our launch, and it lets you automatically save conference call summaries in the context of all your Evernote notes. Each note has summary information, who was on the call, and even a few fun features like who talked the most and least. Additionally, it will keep a record of any recordings or chat messages during the call.

What was that other guy’s name in the call? When did you talk last? Who else was there? Forget trying to remember all these things. Connect Evernote to ÜberConference, and automatically save call summaries in Evernote of every ÜberConference call you have. Each note has a helpful snapshot of the call information, a link to recordings, photos of the people in the call, and a few fun things like stats on the people that talked the most and the least. See how it works in this video.

Evernote makes it simple to remember important details from anywhere, and it works across a wide range of desktop clients and mobile apps. Notes are automatically organized in their own ÜberConference folder, images are embedded in the notes so they load faster, and searching for a particular note by the name of the meeting or participants is a breeze.

Best of all, you can see your ÜberConference call summaries in the context of related notes. So for example, say you are putting an important meeting together. You can:

Create a meeting agenda in Evernote

Schedule a call in ÜberConference and add it to your calendar

Have the call on ÜberConference and record the call

Take notes during the call in Evernote

Automatically save the call summary and recording to Evernote

Link your agenda, notes, and call summary together with any other related notes for quick reference on Evernote

It’s been an exciting time since winning TechCrunch Disrupt, and we have been working on a bunch of new features. We are big fans of Evernote, and are glad to be announcing this integration as our first main release since launch along with a couple other new features –ÜberChat and Instant Conferences. We think the Evernote integration adds a great organizational feature for our users, especially for those that have to manage numerous conference calls.

To get started, just go to your profile page and click the Evernote button to turn it on. We hope you like it!